Pen pals help English learners connect with language, writing at McHenry High School

Writing and English class wasn’t something Aleksy Fernandez put a lot of focus on during his first year of high school.

“I didn’t like writing for school,” Aleksy said, though the 15-year-old sophomore added that he did tend to write his class notes by hand, rather than type them. But writing for fun wasn’t something he did.

“We were lazy as freshmen,” Fernandez said.

This year, the teachers in his English lab class offered students like Aleksy a new way to write that is not formal classwork. They collected biographies of about 50 students in the class who receive help with their classwork and language skills. The teachers matched those biographies with McHenry High School District 156 teachers, administrators and other staff. The two groups would be pen pals. The letters are not assigned, and no grades are given for what they write.

Instead of sending letters to peers at a different school or another state and waiting for the postal service to deliver them, the handwritten letters are put into an envelope, addressed and delivered within the school by Kelsey Podgorski, the newly appointed assistant director of multilingual education for McHenry High.

So far, the students and school staff have traded letters three times.

“I wanted to write more, about the good and the bad about my day.”

—  Aleksy Fernandez, McHenry High School sophomore

One of those pen pals is McHenry High School Upper Campus Principal Jeff Prickett.

“Each letter is a little longer” each time he gets one from his pen pal, Prickett said. “The first one was one paragraph. Then a full page. Then a full page front and back.”

His student pen pal asks about his hobbies and his eight children, Prickett said. He asks the students questions in his letters back to them.

“It has gotten better, to put it bluntly,” Prickett said of the student letters. “The sentences are longer and the questions are better.”

Aleksy said he’s been writing more, too, since the pen pal project started. “I write what I feel and think about when I write in my journal,” he said.

He started writing in a journal earlier this month and said it was the pen pal project that sparked it.

“I wanted to write more, about the good and the bad about my day,” he said.

That information, shared in an interview, gave Podgorski chills.

“You go into education for that reason ... for that sort of reaction,” Podgorski said.

She brought the pen pal program idea to the multi-language teachers who work with students still mastering English. She got the idea from a lecturer who spoke about how primary school students began doing a pen pal program in an elementary school.

She hoped that by writing letters, it would help the students connect better with accessing language.

In the second semester, English language learners take an assessment to see if they are ready to leave the program. It tests students on their reading, writing, speaking and listening skills in the language. Students, Podgorski said, often struggle with the writing and speaking portion of the test.

She hoped that writing by hand, with pen to paper, would help improve that portion of the test.

There are studies, including a 2021 paper published in Psychological Science, that indicate students who write by hand learn a new language faster than those typing on a keyboard or watching a video.

She also is seeing the students connect with their pen pals. She saw one student pass his pen pal in the hallway. “They fist bumped,” Podgorski said, adding the two didn’t know each other until they started writing letters.

That isn’t the case for all of the pals. Charlette Butler, 15, said her pen pal is her cheerleading coach. She’s learning “what she does in her free time, versus seeing her at practice,” Butler said. “I look forward to the letters every week.”

With the latest round of letters, delivered to students the day before their final tests, some of the pen pals sent small presents to the students.

The pen pals “allow for each student to make the connections that we all need post-pandemic, for them to have a ‘cheerleader’ in their corner learning about what is important to the student and ... showing the students that we care and just how valuable they are to us,” Podgorski said.